Half N’ Half
by kings-mxvie
Summary: Amber Brown is torn. With recent news that her father was a deadbeat with another family to add their money troubles, and no way to win back Andi after betraying her trust after the Ferris Wheel incident, she’s left home alone during the Shadyside Fall Festival in despair. If only a new face with the same situation could console her.


Amber could never really place when this random spell of fate could become everything she needed, especially in this dire time. How could their lives have become so upside down in a matter of hours? And why was it that they were only left with each other?

She thought and she spun, dancing about her baby blue room and decorating. Because making room for the new required a little sparkle here and there.

Getting lost in the music Amber used to sway to with a certain short-haired someone she betrayed, the blonde teen began connecting the dots. The pep in her dancing step was losing it's balance when she started reminiscing.

_There it was._

It started when her dad lied about losing his job to _"protect" _her family.

Mr.Brown, Amber's father had not one, but two families to protect in that case.

Ms. Brown knew there was an issue when the 75 dollars they splurged each month to make ends became $33.11.

Amber then felt desperate to sell the lovely, expensive long satin red dress she planned to gift Andi to woo her back at the annual Shadyside fall festival concert.

Red was Andi's favorite color, and she wanted to make amends for her sweet frenemy-turned-friend. Red was also $220 dollars worth that would last the Brown family of three a few months. Sadly, this sacrifice took itself out on the fall festival where she finally planned to win Andi back.

The fall festival she ultimately missed, and missed the chance where she could make amends with Andi Mack after the Ferris wheel incident by buying that lavish dress Andi was eyeing when the two had formerly hung out. The festival that was happening right now, 7pm.

She was even more upset she couldn't redo everything she screwed up with Andi. Amber has really liked spending time with her. And it was getting unhealthy to rearrange her room the way her creative frenemy once would have just because she couldn't stop thinking about her.

However, the rationale in Amber knew she could just walk down Shadyside empty-handed and say:

"Hey, sorry for leaving you stranded on a Ferris wheel, getting you arrested, abusing Jonah's trust to trick him into thinking you lied about me cheating on Jonah, and cheating on Jonah."

The blonde girl at once shook her head, how fictious and ridiculous! She aimlessly braided and unbraided her unwashed and frizzeled hair, the same way she detangled and weaved out the mess she cluttered around her room. Her hair and room were unkempt the last 3 days, because so much had happened in so little time.

Everything she touched or aimed for had turned into a mess and there was no use in fixing it.

She was getting so close to Andi and she screwed that up, and could never quite get out of her head how pretty Andi looked laughing in the blinking neon sky-and the artsy short-haired girl was pretty _cute_, admittedly, even when angry at her, stuck in the seat of a carnival ride.

But this wasn't the only issue piling onto her plate.

Half of her own family's money was going to her family-or whatever this broken domestic mess was-and half to another mother and half sibling. This was a confession her father finally let out when Amber wanted to sell her hunger as well. At the night of the fall festival she hadn't come out of her room or eaten for 2 days.

'How could you love someone but decide to have another version of them?'

She pondered on her mother's last screams once her father had left in cognizant with her regrets of Andi. That quote repeated through head those entire 3 days, and instantly the irony with Jonah and Andi revealing the blonde's infidelity month's ago emerged her head.

The indefinite answer: _we ruin our old things by replacing them because we don't value them enough. Once others find the antique wreckage, the novelty of the new toy dies off. All that's left is guilt and broken pieces of what's been replaced-old or new. _

Amber wrote this in her diary, etching a simple generalization of all the things that had happened in her life into a scribbled, unneat philosophy until her knuckles turned white.

"God, I'm such an idiot!" Amber whispered to herself with a gutteral wail; dropping her pen, diary, and her body onto her bed hopelessly. Every single mistake she had made this past year was crashing down on her, and it was all her fault.

Jonah, Andi, the two getting together, Amber realizing she never liked the boy she cheated on him with in the first place. Or boys at all. Coming to terms with the fact that the girl she truly liked would never forgive her.

Tear drops poured into puddles on her small pink blanket, and Amber felt like a stupid toddler crying into the babyish unicorn blanket she now decidedly huddled herself in. Maybe she should have sold it too! And her journal, because everyone deserved to hear for free the kind of monster she felt she truly was!

Just as she weeped for a mere 11 minutes to pass, the doorbell to the Brown residence rang. A great distraction for her shameful, pitiful conscience.

Amber quickly sprang up from the makeshift unicorn blanket cocoon, dabbing some _Rosé__ parfum _from head to toe, a hairbrush to her raggéd locks and a damp towel to her face to appear somewhat presentable. After that, she dashed downstairs from her bedroom of misery to the warmer, welcoming entrance of the front door.

Her parents (or just her mom, considering her dad had a whole other family to feed) always warned her not to answer the door for strangers. But maybe she needed some deranged creep to stab her out of her misery, and to annoy the weird rando as payback by using deprecating humor to vent all her personal struggles.

And for that stranger, unbeknownst to Amber at the time, to become all she needed.

The front door opened ajar to patch a bandaid to the first entry of the sadness Amber once felt. The next page of her life-a happier one she needed more than ever was smirking at her from the glass door pain.

"What, you scared I'm gonna rob you or somethin'?"


End file.
